Back in January of 2016, I began a series of monthly blog posts cataloging self-experimentation and meditations that I had experienced over the course of the month. I was capping a three-month binge on Tim Ferriss’s podcasts followed by a thorough reading of The Four-Hour Workweek and a stack of Tim’s blog posts. Something deep in my brain told me that I should begin a similar series of experiments along with associated documentation, and I jumped in. I gave up coffee for the first time. I started waking up at 5:30 for workouts. In my final post (January 2017), I just straight ditched food for a bit, inspired by the work of Dom D’Agostino.

Then, as many of my friends have repeatedly reminded me, I went radio silent.

Oh, sure, I wrote plenty of blog posts, but then I’d scrap them all as being mostly garbage. Nothing seemed to really resonate with me like the monthly posts of that year did. And it’s not like nothing happened, either! Major developments at work, changes in my physical fitness - hell, I even got engaged! Yet the words refused to come in a way that resonated with me. So I kept taking notes, and I waited.

This is a post about self-mastery.

This is not a post about self-determination, or self-experimentation. It is also not a post about skill-mastery.

When I was twenty-one years old, I wanted to control computers. I was unhappy about a lot of stuff - my long-distance relationship, my total lack of a job, the fact that my college and grad school programs weren’t really what I wanted but I was too chicken to take bold steps, you name it, I could find a way to gripe about it. So I got into MIT’s Intro to Computer Science course and I started learning how to control computers. I read TechCrunch diligently and was convinced that if I could just get a job as a developer, I could turn my whole life around. That would fix all of my problems.

Fast-forward to age twenty-five, and someone actually gave me a job as a developer. This is one of the worst things that can happen to you if you started learning how to program in order to change your life. Suddenly, you realize that actual software development can be sometimes really terrible. There is nothing about a career in software development that is actually designed to fix your life. You still have the same problems. This was the start of a pretty nasty downward spiral for me.

Somewhere in this mental morass, I stumbled upon a book list from Jack Dorsey, founder of both Twitter and Square. One of his top four books was The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, a collection of proverbs on the classical philosophy of yoga. There is no discussion of stretching or postures - this book is about mental state and the philosophy of the self. It’s a religious text (and the translation I got had all the commentary), but it shook me up enough times that I returned to re-read it over and over. The first sutra: “Yoga is the stilling of the mind.” My mind was nowhere near “still”, but Patanjali was at least offering the idea that stillness was something attainable, and you had to practice to get there. It sounded better than the utter hellscape that was my then-current mental state of ambition in six different directions combined with second-guessing and a total inability to focus.

I tried everything. I diligently practiced meditation using whatever app I could get my hands on. I thought that some of Patanjali’s ideas on mindfulness might be easier to use if I saw them in a western Christian context that was similar to how I grew up, so I read Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God. I would try to intensely focus while lifting weights, something that had previously helped focus me in the past. I tried to find focus in code. I got a new engineering job, one that made me feel more “developer-like.” It all culminated in a series of fairly epic panic attacks, and then I discovered Tim Ferriss. (I wrote about all of that here)

Now we’re all caught up to the start of those monthly blog posts, so I can start talking about self-mastery.

Tim Ferriss’s interviewees are experts in their respective fields. They might be major celebrities, or they might be total unknowns, but they are unquestionably experts in something. I hoped to one day be an expert in something, though I didn’t know what. I thought that maybe if I copied what they did, I could be like them. My initial model was Tim himself, who is basically an expert in relentless self-experimentation and writing it all down. Anyone can do that, so I tried it out. Then I took Jocko Willink as inspiration too, so I started waking up super-early. I liked Jamie Foxx’s workout plan, so I started doing lots push-ups and pull-ups. I relentlessly copied EVERYONE.

When you’re trying to learn a skill, you can pretty much take whatever route works best for you to get there. I know that I learn computer science concepts most effectively if I read and take notes as opposed to watching videos. The reverse is true for weightlifting, where I’m better if I just watch a video and emulate it in the mirror than if I read about it. When you’re trying to emulate a person, though, you have to do what they do. “How hard could that be?” I thought. All of the steps are laid out in front of me, I just have to go do them.

Jocko Willink wakes up at 4:30 every day and posts a photo of his watch to Instagram. Jocko sells t-shirts that say “Discipline equals freedom.” Jocko was once asked how to be tougher, and his answer was “if you want to be tougher mentally, it is simple: be tougher. Don’t meditate on it. Just be tougher.” Jocko was asked how to avoid injury during BUDS training and his response was “be tougher.”

I tried and failed to emulate Jocko’s level of discipline. I like drinking beer and playing video games and sleeping in. Jocko does none of these things, because Jocko is constantly preparing and training himself. I said I wanted to act like Jocko, but I didn’t want to give any of those things up.

It’s not just Jocko who constantly reminds me of my total lack of self-mastery, though. My roommate Lauren wakes up every morning to hit the gym before 6:00AM and has typically logged a workout by the time I’m pouring my first cup of coffee. My friend and coworker Brian regularly puts his daughter to bed and then goes into his basement lab to take a Coursera course so he can keep learning, while I am figuring out which new game on Steam I want to buy. My fiancée Linda is able to totally forget about Internet distractions and actually enjoy the world around her, while I can’t stop fidgeting with my phone and regularly have to delete social media apps just to stop playing with them.

I am writing a post about self-mastery because I am not yet a master of myself.

I think I can get there. I think I had to first recognize that there were examples out there and I needed to try to copy them. I needed to fail first to recognize what self-mastery really looked like. And then, after I failed, I needed some processing time to recognize that the strides I took to actually get to failure had put me not too far off from a place I wanted to get to anyway! My relationships are in a happier place. I’m in a much more enjoyable career.

My first steps in processing that failure was to simply wave my hands and say that it was all fine. I would look at my successes, say “can’t be good at everything” and move on. But it didn’t stop the gnawing feeling that I could do better. I’m still frustrated when I lose mastery over myself and sleep in past when I told myself I’d wake up for yoga, or when I grumpily snap at my fiancée because I do not have mastery over which words come out reflexively. Shrugging those types of things off is not acceptable to me, and they are regular reminders of my own lack of mastery.

This is where my head is now, pondering on how to better master myself. I welcome advice and wisdom.

"And what is it now that you have to give? What is it that you've learned, that you're able to do?"
"I can think, I can wait, I can fast."
"That's everything?"
"I believe that's everything!"
"And what's the use of that? For example, the fasting-- what is it good for?"
"It is very good, sir. When a person has nothing to eat, fasting is the smartest thing he could do. When, for example, Siddhartha hadn't learned to fast, he would have to accept any kind of service before this day is up, whether it may be with you or wherever, because hunger would force him to do so. But like this, Siddhartha can wait calmly, he knows no impatience, he knows no emergency, for a long time he can allow hunger to besiege him and can laugh about it. This, sir, is what fasting is good for."
-- Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse

This month, I fasted for 51 hours. It was awesome. This post is going to be the perfect hybridization of “weird experiments Joe conducts on himself” combined with “Joe might think about his digestive tract a little too much,” so I hope anyone reading this is as excited as I was to write it.

Since the middle of November up until the fast that started the night of January 12, I participated in a dietary experiment called the “slow-carb diet.” In essence, I strike nearly all sugars and carbohydrates out of my diet (though I allow a little bit of fruit), and I replace those calories with extra fat, protein, and vegetables. The idea is to trigger a change in physiology to allow your body to more easily convert fat into energy as needed, rather than storing extra glucose in the body as body fat. I did not do weigh-ins at the beginning of this experiment, but I have experienced a reduction in fat around my midsection and thighs.

The slow-carb diet is a modified version of the ketogenic diet, which is the brainchild of researchers at the Johns Hopkins Epilepsy Center and is being tested for a variety of different conditions. One of its core tenets is that you begin the diet with fasting, which triggers the body to enter ketosis and begin using fat as an energy source more quickly.

Now, I do not suffer from epilepsy, nor do I have an insane desire for weight loss that would provoke me to not eat for a few days. I was curious about the impact fasting would have on my psyche. Would I have the mental discipline to go through with it? What would it feel like to not eat for three days? Would I sleep through most of it or be in hungry pain? There was only one way to find out.

So, from January 9 to January 12, I maintained strict discipline on my extremely low-carb high-fat diet, and at 6:00PM January 12, I ate my last meal in an airport. It was a Cobb salad.

On January 13, I woke up, pounded a bottle of water with some salt in it to make sure my electrolytes stayed up, and started walking around my neighborhood to stretch my legs out. I came back, more water, then had some tea with Brain Octane in it. Brain Octane is essentially coconut oil if you took out everything that wasn’t pure lipids in it. It’s a layer of concentrated oil that’s packed with fatty calories. Over the course of the 13th, I would drink about 1000 calories worth of this weird little fat cocktail in order to prod my body along into ketosis by giving it ample sources of fat to use as fuel.

I was expecting my stomach to be in physical pain for most of Friday, but that turned out to not be the case. I felt typical hunger pangs that intensified until about 3PM. After 3PM, the pangs subsided and were replaced with more of a vague awareness that I hadn’t eaten. I didn’t feel a substantial drop of energy, though the caffeine may have contributed to that. I was able to stay on track with work throughout most of the day.

After 24 hours (around 6PM on Friday) is when things started to get interesting. My mental focus went way up, though it admittedly got redirected into an obsessive desire to win a long game of Civilization V. And when I say long, I mean that I had to turn my computer off at 3AM and make myself go to bed, because I really didn’t have a desire to sleep. I was charged up. I had a manic desire to go see if I could do a distance run that I suppressed. My guess is that this is a primitive instinct to forego sleep in favor of going out to kill a zebra or something, and there is some evidence from online research that this weird shift in circadian rhythm is not unheard of in fasters. No medical evidence as to why, though.

I can’t remember exactly when I dragged myself out of bed the next day, but I’m pretty sure it was around 2PM. I woke up late, sleeping through my planned fasting halfway point of 36 hours. I didn’t really feel like getting out of bed but felt I should at least get the blood pumping. Little bit more tea with Brain Octane. More water - at that point I was wickedly dehydrated from being in bed for almost twelve hours. I kicked the water consumption into high gear, because I was starting to experience an occasional heart palpitation and headache that I thought might have been due to a lack of electrolytes.

Still, at this point, I was bored. I was tired of sitting in my house. I was tired of doing the same lazy activities, which surprised me because I thought I loved lazy introverted activities enough to do them for an entire weekend. This was not true. I didn’t physically feel weird, aside from a slight weakness that I’ve felt before after recovering from an illness. I hit the 48 hour mark, fist-pumped, and thought I was going to cruise through the final 24 hours with ease.

That turned out to not be the case. This is where the “you should probably do this sort of stuff with medical supervision” comes in.

From Hour 48 to Hour 51, I started thinking hard about food. I wasn’t getting hunger pangs, but I couldn’t stay focused on anything because the thoughts of food were all-consuming. That was an interesting sign. My headaches came back and I started drinking more water. I started feeling physically weaker. At Hour 51, I started getting a churning feeling in my stomach like I was about to vomit, and when I burped, there was a taste in my mouth that I didn’t like at all. I decided that was a combination of physical symptoms that I didn’t want to discover was a sign of something bad, so I canceled the experiment. I walked to go get a burrito and a torta and the local burrito shop.

Refeeding was a pretty straightforward affair. I nibbled on the food consistently for about 2.5 hours, as I was a little nervous that it might come back up if I didn’t practice some discipline. I didn’t feel greasy or gross after taking out an entire torta and half a burrito (with rice). I didn’t really feel full. Just sort of contented. I still couldn’t get to sleep before 3AM.

I set my alarm for 9AM the following morning to try to force my circadian rhythm back into some sense. I ate the other half of the burrito. I went to brunch. I had pizza for dinner. The combination of all of these things would normally put me into a coma without some serious exercise. No sense of illness, no sense of bloat. I have not resumed the high-fat, low-carb diet since the fast ended. I have, however, found myself naturally restricting my portions throughout the day and eating larger meals at night. Something I might tinker with in the coming weeks.

So, what have I learned?

I will absolutely do this again. It was an extremely interesting mental shift and a way to shake up my relationship with food.

You should definitely not try this if you’re trying to lose weight. For starters, it wasn’t really effective for that. Perhaps more concerning than that, though: you might actually cause a medical trauma to yourself. I picked up the burrito because something didn’t feel right. If you’re trying to lose weight rather than just paying attention to how you feel, you might not make the same choices.

If you’re trying for weight loss or body recomposition (i.e., less fat in bad places), I highly recommend trying the slow-carb diet over an eight-week period. It worked wonders for me without a lot of struggle.

If you’re trying the slow-carb diet, you should do your homework and you shouldn’t try to mix and match with other diet plans. I’m mostly speaking about the fat content of the diet here. You cannot, absolutely cannot, listen to the “low carb” portion of this diet and ignore the “eat lots of fat” portion. My breakfast when slow-carbing was four eggs, Greek yogurt, beans, spinach, and whole milk. Do not try to dodge the fat.

I probably don’t need to eat the portion sizes I do. Or rather, I should make sure to tailor my eating to the amount of exercise I’m actually doing that day rather than the exercise I think I should be doing that day.

If I don’t eat for an entire day, it will not make me grouchy if I go into it with the right attitude. It does, however, help to plan for that.

I tried to be as detailed as I could about my experience with fasting. If you have any questions about what it was like, or are curious about trying it yourself, I’m happy to answer what I can!

Any and all writings submitted around this time of the year should have something to say about the year as a whole, and I have therefore struggled to start writing anything. I felt like I had something poignant to say at the end of last year, and I put it out there. It was about traveling a lot and being really excited to explore new territory, and it was written with a sense of gratitude that I was finally getting to hop around the country and the world like I’d always wanted to.

I mean, I could write something like that now. I played on the beach in Rio, camped in Maryland, visited Disney World, spent a lot of time in San Francisco, and watched a soccer game in England. Those things are awesome, and they make me recall almost a decade ago around this time when I was planning my first ever trip abroad (I’ve come a long way since then). But the traveling in 2015 was about growth; it was about stretching my comfort zone. The travel in 2016 was about vacation, so it doesn’t make for as good of a story. There’s no character arc.

What’s different about 2016 is the writing itself.

I never announced it. I just had this idea in my head that I would write a recap every month of 2016 and capture what I’d done and what I’d learned. I’d “publish” those recaps, meaning I’d put them on my social media channels where my friends would see them and I’d feel ashamed if I didn’t write one. The reward for me was that I’d have some push to not be a slouch for an entire month - I didn’t expect anyone would actually use them. But some people have told me they were able to apply a few snippets to their lives, which I’m happy to hear.

I’m reviewing those old posts now and it’s interesting to look at patterns. Here are a few:

I appear to be more productive as the weather gets colder. Around this time last year and going into the deeper winter, I was hyper-productive. As the spring and summer picked up, I struggled to work because I just wanted to be out and about finding shenanigans. And shenanigans were found.

My productivity starts to crack if I don’t establish predictable schedules. I can look at a few months where I know that I let someone else control my schedule on an ad hoc basis, and those months were generally ones that I watched more TV and did less actual work.

My fitness slacking that led to my injury in November looks like it had some warning signs around not making the time for workouts that I’ll have to keep an eye out for.

I didn’t have a goal most of the time. These posts aren’t a pursuit of a coherent narrative; they’re jumbled.

I don’t have a plan yet for how to respond to these things. What I’m doing now is rebasing.

I got injured in November. It sucked. My first ever lower back injury knocked me right on my tail and I decided I was never, ever going to let that happen again.

And that got me thinking: how much of this do I really enjoy if I’m not at peak physical performance? If I read a whole lot of books but sacrifice my sleep to do it, did I really enjoy the books, or did I just sweat to churn through books? Was going out night after night worth it if I just ended up with an injury due to lack of mobility?

So this month, here are a few steps I’ve taken to address that:

Running at least twice a week. I’m striving to slowly ease myself back to be able to comfortably do five miles. I do not take shin splints or lower back pain lightly while I’m doing this.

Resistance training at least twice a week. This has come in the form of kettlebell swings, mace swings, and push-ups. Lots of push-ups. This is not done the same day as the running.

Mobility training. Apparently everyone I know can do a third world squat with ease, but I can’t. Yet.

Yoga, every day, for at least fifteen minutes. I use Gaiam’s Yoga Studio app, which is really quite nice. It has all of these canned classes that you can save and play at all levels of training. I typically do a fifteen minute class before resistance training or running, and a half hour class on my resistance training off days.

Sleep. I set my alarm for 7:00AM, turn my screens off at 10PM and put my phone across the room, and try to be out cold by 11PM. I am experimenting with the optimal amount of sleep here, as I’ve still been feeling sleepy with eight hours of sleep.

I was blessed to grow up in an environment with parents who encouraged me to read. My parents made me save up my money for toys from a young age - I distinctly remember being told to save up my money from the “tooth fairy” so that I could have enough to purchase a $2.50 Lego toy. I never wanted for books, though. We’d go to the library to look for new things to read, and I always got new books for Christmas. Now, at age 28, my parents buy me Legos for Christmas and I buy my own books. Times have changed.

When I first started writing regularly earlier this year, the first comments I received from friends were often about my book lists. Some people picked up a few of the books themselves. Others asked how I picked things to read. I maintain a running list on Goodreads that I sporadically re-populate with recommendations from people I respect. Bill Gates is one of those. Every year he posts his list of favorite books he’s read during the year, and I was inspired to do the same this year.

So, without further ado, the 2016 list, along with some commentary.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman. What if, when immigrants came to America, they brought their gods with them? What if the spirit of Odin still wandered through the colder parts of America - and what if he wasn’t just a spirit, but a walking, breathing man? That’s the premise of American Gods, which follows a recently released prisoner through a road trip to rally the last of the old gods in a battle against the tyranny of the new ones: technology, media, and overspending. It’s an incredibly fun read and it gets you completely lost in a new world. And there’s a bonus: if you read it now, you can be ahead of the TV show coming out.

High Output Management by Andy Grove. I’ve had this book on my list for a while as it comes recommended by most of the tech industry CEOs and venture capitalists who were at the right age to be mentored by Andy Grove. Grove was a engineer at Intel before rising up through the ranks to take the top job, and he had a lot of fantastic lessons about how to manage others. The big eye-opener for me was the thinking that “my work” is no longer what I produce myself, but what I can empower others to do as well - even if they don’t report to me. It’s been a big maturing step for me as I come to the office every day.

Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. There are two really amazing things about this book. The first is the stories of entrepreneurs who had major roles in products that have now become commonplace: Steve Wozniak with Apple, Paul Buchheit with Gmail, Max Levchin with PayPal. (added feature: you get to learn about how Elon Musk almost accidentally tanked PayPal, which would have made the world a much different place than it is today) You learn that with a few rare exceptions, most of these founders didn’t really know what they were doing at the time, and many of them spent months or years doing the wrong thing. (PayPal was initially going to be a vendor of souped-up VPN tokens) The second wonderful thing about this book is learning about the company founders who aren’t doing something sexy for the news to pick up, just quietly building successful businesses. Stories like Joshua Schachter, who founded Delicious as a pet project while working full-time at Morgan Stanley, or Joel Spolsky, who just wanted to make a software company filled with people he’d like to work with.

Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. This was the penultimate book in a lot of thinking and practice I’d done in meditation and mindfulness. When I picked up this book, I had been searching for techniques to quiet my mind for some time. My brain ran wild and typically down horrifying paths that were absolutely no good for my well-being. I’d tried the Calm app, the Headspace app, and countless other books and videos to get some control over my mind. Nothing worked. Brach’s book was the turning point for me: it took away the fear and frustration.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. All of the praise for this book - it’s all true. This is a book about a world I didn’t have to grow up in, but my friends did. It’s a book for people who couldn’t get their head around Ferguson or Trayvon Martin because it’s a world I never had to experience. It’s a book for people who only really had racism talked about in the abstract, never as someone who’s experienced it directly walking through their thoughts on the concept and how those thoughts evolved over time. I can’t recommend it enough.

Mastery by Robert Greene. Greene opens the book fairly early on by driving a huge wedge between “financial or business success” with “mastery of an art or craft.” He’s not talking about the former. He’s not talking about the celebrity status now bequeathed to Jiro Ono; he’s talking about the years Ono put into perfecting his craft long before Jiro Dreams of Sushi was filmed. Greene doesn’t promise you’ll be successful, well-liked, or emotionally stable: these things do not concern the people he considers masters. Give it a read. For those of us who think we want to “master” something, Greene has some words on what that really takes.

Honorable mention:Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. First sentence of the book: “The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.” This is the story of how modern-day humans would respond to such a catastrophe. What if we knew a catastrophe was coming, we couldn’t stop it, and we only had two years to prepare? What would happen? Could we survive? I had a great time reading this book, and if you want to learn more than you ever thought you wanted to about orbital mechanics, you’ll have a great time with it too.

On Thursday, November 3, I sat down on my couch with a curious tinge in my lower back. It was the sort of tinge where you think “huh, little stiff there” and try to take it easy. I told myself it would loosen up and woke up the next morning and went about my day.

On Saturday, November 5, I woke up screaming in pain. My back was in knots. I couldn’t even find a comfortable position to sit down without wincing. I tried to bend over to loosen everything up and almost fell over. I canceled everything I wanted to do for the weekend and relegated myself to the couch to binge on Netflix.

“Old!” I cried. “This is the first sign! I’m going to have to be careful from here on out about any strenuous activity from here on out. What does that mean for my love of weightlifting? Will I be able to run or play basketball again?”

I am prone to melodrama.

On Monday, May 30, I posted my May blog post. I hated it. You can see me talking about stuff I did, and books I read, and things I lifted, but I hated how I felt at the time of writing it. I was struggling to get through it because I felt like I hadn’t really been doing anything productive for weeks. I’d just been playing video games and watching Netflix and making myself work out at home so I wouldn’t feel awful about myself for not going to the gym.

But it didn’t stop there. I proceeded to watch the entirety of Doctor Who (the new seasons) throughout the rest of the summer and fall. Over 120 hours of butt, glued to couch, watching TV. I didn’t read books, not at the volume I had been, anyway. I wasn’t slinging code. I was doing that which was required of me, day in and day out, and nothing else. Nothing at the next level.

On Monday, October 31, I declared “time to start getting myself hardcore in shape again!” I did two-a-day workouts every day that week. I ran. I lifted things. I played basketball for two hours straight against kids who are out there all the time. I haven’t gone running heavily in at least a year. I haven’t played basketball in months. And yet, I was going to do it! All in two-a-day format!

And on Saturday, November 5, with my back in knots, I cried “woe is me, I have grown old.” Took me about five days to put two and two together and say “bro, you’re not old, you’re just out of shape.”

AS IT TURNED OUT TO MY UNENDING SURPRISE AND CONFUSION, one can not stop doing heavy deadlifts and squats, stop running, and stop doing any flexibility training whatsoever and suddenly expect to start doing hardcore two-a-day workouts without injury. Human beings don’t work like that, and my back muscles are perfectly happy to remind me of that.

As I’m prone to do, I started pondering what this meant for other areas of my life. I was so blinded by my insistence that I was a certain person - a person committed to fitness - that I was really scared to admit that I might have lost it. And I have this mental picture of myself as someone with a ton of grit that it really shook me up to write about certain months this year where I didn’t really do a whole lot of productive stuff and played video games instead. In both cases, I couldn’t give myself an honest assessment of my current status - which was exactly what I needed to do to make things better. I needed to get off the mental high of “self improvement” and just start doing things that made me a better person and made me happy.

So this month is about recovery. I’ve been losing ground.

How am I recovering?

First things first, and the number one priority, is getting my physical fitness back in order. This starts with yoga. I’m choosing yoga because my overall strength has gotten out of whack: certain muscles are still reasonably strong, while certain muscles have weakened. All of them are in flexible. That combination means that I can do serious damage to myself when the strong muscles start to compensate for the weaker ones with unexpected movements, which triggers the inflexibility, which puts me on my rear again. I’m also starting to run again, but short distances: one block at a time until I get back to a distance I’m happy with.

I could go to a yoga studio, but I really hate scheduled workouts. Instead, I’ve been using the Gaiam Yoga Studio App to put myself back in order. It’s got a load of things that make it awesome. It’s cheap ($4), it’s got a one-time cost, it lets me download videos ahead of time instead of throwing my mojo off by bad streaming, and it’s got plenty of different workout times while I’m ramping back up. It even lets me follow the fifteen minutes principle. That has translated into doing yoga in some form or fashion every day since November 14, which is fantastic.

Long term plans for physical fitness are still TBD - I’m rebuilding my flexibility first - but I am envisioning something like the workout plans I used to follow back when I was doing P90X. That means two days a week dedicated to yoga, two days a week dedicated to strength, and two days toward cardio. I’d like to get back to being able to run six miles again, and I’d kinda like to be able to do a handstand, too.

For the productivity, that’s about taking out wasted time. I’m defining “wasted” time not simply as unproductive moments, but as moments that are distinctly spent doing something I don’t really care about. If I’m out with my friends, that’s not a wasted moment, even if I don’t get some productive thing done that I’d planned on. If I’m mindlessly scrolling through Reddit, that’s a wasted moment. Yet I’ve never had the ability to effectively block out time-wasters until this month, when my buddy John told me about an app called Freedom. Freedom blocks you from opening certain web sites, but it also allows you to choose certain apps that you want blocked as well. I have a blocklist that includes Reddit, Hacker News, and Instagram, and I flip it on for 30 minutes whenever I need to get something started. (like this blog post!) I use BlockSite for the same purpose on Chrome.

In addition, and at the encouragement of my girlfriend, I’ve taken some of this time to proactively keep my place clean and organized. I’m making sure that laundry is either in the hamper or folded and put away by the time I leave the house in the morning. I take a few more of those fifteen minute intervals to make sure things are in their right place. On Sundays I do a bit of a deeper clean. Does any of this make me inherently more productive? To be honest, I don’t think so. The benefits are mental. There’s no time spent saying “oh, you know, I really should fold that laundry…” and no time spent rushing around stressed because people are coming over and my place is a wreck. It’s always already taken care of. The worst case scenario is now good enough that I don’t sweat it if it happens.

As a closing statement, I know I’m not the only one who feels like they’ve lost ground in something. Maybe it’s your fitness like me, or maybe it’s your work ethic, or maybe it’s something even deeper and more personal. Just remember that point you feel like you’ve lost - you got there somehow, and you backslid somehow, and acting like you’re somewhere that you’re not isn’t going to help you get to where you want to go.

This post is titled “Hypertrophy” because I am choosing to focus on the physiological principle that human beings get stronger when their muscles are forced to hit the limit. There is no growth without somehow getting knocked down.

P.S…..

List format:

Read three books

Code Complete by Steve McConnell (by the way, this thing is a monster. It’s good knowledge to have and I’m glad I read it as an engineer, but it is the size of the biggest Harry Potter book ever and nowhere near as easy to read)

I had a post for this month that I was really struggling to write. I was pushing through it and pushing through it and thought I almost might have had a good idea… and then my computer restarted for a security update and all of the changes were lost. So this blog post is coming from scratch.

Heck, this whole writing experiment is a reboot from scratch every month. I never know how I’m going to reinvent myself. I had this grand idea at the beginning of the year that I was going to focus on my health in the first part of the year, then focus on my career, then focus on personal education, then focus on saving money. I think that was the order of the goals. I got lost after the first two months and then got a new job and then I forgot about all of those plans and started doing new stuff.

I see tons of people with all of this focus and I wonder how they maintain it. I wonder how much more I could have done if I hadn’t decided to watch every episode of the Doctor Who reboot this year. Do you know how much TV that is? And I binged through all of Jessica Jones back in February, and The Man in the High Castle, and probably some other show that I forgot about. It’s even worse when I think about the amount of hours I logged going for completeness in Skyrim. I could have built an app, or learned to speak a new language, or something.

When I started this year I was at this weird place where I was just accepting what it meant to truly take some responsibility for the outcomes of my life, and that’s where the grand idea with all those different focuses came in. Previously, I’d taken “responsibility” to mean “taking action,” and that’s certainly a component of it. But “taking action” was all I was doing. I was hacking away at stuff as fast as I possibly could, but I wasn’t really taking a step back and thinking about if I was doing the right thing. Checking stuff off of a to-do list made me feel good, and as long as I was feeling good I never stopped to think if the items on the to-do list were the right ones, or even if I cared about doing them at all. And I certainly wasn’t thinking about external consequences. I’d hack on something, and see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, I’d try something new or quit. I quit a lot.

Now I say yes to way less stuff, and I keep my eyes open more. I try to listen more. One of the conditions of my hacking is that I would tend to do it at the expense of my relationships - because if you’re trying to execute on a bunch of random experiments with no clear direction you hardly have time to be paying attention to the people in your life, most of whom are way more complex than the to-dos I was concocting in my head. I’m trying to learn more from the people around me rather than books or guides on the Internet. I’m trying to be a better boyfriend, brother, friend, son, cousin.

I look toward the close of the year with excitement because it’s definitely not where I started the year and definitely not where I expected to be at the end of October. I started the year itching to travel and escape DC. I’m now looking forward to being at home for a bit after spending time in six cities in one month: DC, Houston, New York, London, Liverpool, and Edinburgh. I started the year feeling stuck in my job, and now I’m ending the year feeling like I’ve experienced insane career and knowledge growth in the past six months. I feel like I have better relationships with more people than I did this time last year.

I look back and I know I accomplished all of this because I was really fortunate to have people around me who put up with my insanity and pardoned me when I forgot to answer their text messages or said something really rude unintentionally. Most of you probably don’t even know that you helped, because you were just off being yourselves and I was scrambling trying to figure out how to be more like you. So if you’re stuck in any way - whether you’re feeling like you don’t know where your life’s going or what to do with your job or you’re trying to crack the next level in your career or you’re just looking for a good book to read - I’d love to try to help. I’ve learned a lot from all of you and maybe I have something to share.

This blog post was a bit rambling, and I’m sorry about that. I didn’t have a clear thought, just a whole lot of gratitude.

It’s a fascinating notion, time. I used to start stressing out if my web applications took longer than 300 milliseconds to respond to an incoming request, which is about as much time as it takes for you to blink your eye. I know that taking one of the 50-series buses back to my house will take about ten minutes longer than one of the 60’s (but there are less frequent 60’s), so I will recalculate public transportation options based on when each bus is coming at the time I arrive at the bus stop. I am constantly re-evaluating and optimizing how I spend my day, because certain things (commuting) are a waste of time, others are a necessary evil (cooking, laundry), others are valuable and enjoyable (writing), and some are just plain fun (watching Doctor Who, a show about a time traveler that I’ve been binging on this year).

I find large chunks of future daunting to evaluate. I tend to optimize for minutes, not days or weeks, and so I struggle to truly focus on the long term and am constantly going for short-term victories. Yet I want to accomplish so much - I want to build things, I want to create great ideas, I want to develop wonderful relationships. I want to do a lot of things that aren’t accomplished in minutes, they’re accomplished over weeks and months and lifetimes. For years I’ve struggled to reconcile my desire for big things with my tendency toward little thinking.

An idea to resolve this conflict began to take root in my mind when I stumbled upon a Reddit post about 15 push-ups. It’s a simple idea:

“LPT: There is a visible difference between not working out at all and doing 15 pushups every day. Make 15 push ups your new ‘not working out’.” - source

I originally started chewing on this idea from a purely fitness-related perspective, and I liked it. If you’re doing 15 push-ups a day, you’re not going to turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger, but you’re moving the needle forward. You’re doing something positive in a short window of time that will train your body into something stronger than it would have been otherwise. That step forward is important mentally and physically.

Now, fast forward a few weeks, and I’m reading the book Founders at Work while on a trip to Charleston, SC. In Founders at Work, Jessica Livingston conducts a series of interviews with business founders to discuss the early days of their businesses. The results are fascinating. There are some archetypal stories in there (Apple, PayPal) as well as some slightly off the wall ones (Hot or Not). But one of the ones that really stuck with me was the tale of the early days of del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site that eventually sold to Yahoo for an undisclosed amount.

When Joshua Schachter founded del.icio.us, he wasn’t trying to become a startup founder. He was working as a quant for Morgan Stanley full-time: a job notorious for long, stressful hours. But here he is with del.icio.us, a hack project that was realized to the world and was getting some 30,000 users. Here was how he described those early days:

**Livingston:** When you were doing this in your spare time, did you ever say, "Ugh. This is too much work"?
**Schacter:** Not really. I was always very careful...to structure the code...such that I could come in and look at it, figure out what I'm doing, do it, and be done for the day in 15 minutes. So if I could get one thing done a day, I was happy. A lot of stuff, if I could spend more time, I did, but as long as I could get one or two things done a week total, if I didn't have time, I didn't have time. So it moved pretty slowly. I worked on it for years.

That passage is fascinating to me. Fifteen minutes a day! While working as a quant for Morgan Stanley!

So this month, I started tinkering around with fifteen minutes. When I’m feeling daunted by the scale of a task, I set my timer for fifteen minutes and crank. I’m moving the needle forward. I’m getting my fifteen push-ups in.

There’s a surprising amount of stuff you can do in fifteen minutes, like:

Work out

Fold your laundry

Straighten your room up

Write a single code function

Pay your bills

Purchase and initialize a server

Learn how to send a custom HTTP method in Python

Read a few pages of a book

etc., etc.

You keep stacking those fifteen minutes up and up and suddenly you’re staring at something you’re proud of. I built an app called “FutureSelf,” which plays on my obsession with time and allows me to send picture messages to myself in the future. I wrote a Python library that lets me analyze log files in Spark. I set up my own personal, hosted version of Dropbox.

These are things I wanted to accomplish, and the principles are the same for anyone out there reading this. Set your time for fifteen minutes. Crank. Move the needle forward just a little bit whenever you can. You’ll be shocked at what you can get done.

This is a mini-post: something I learned about today at work that I thought was awesome in and of itself. It’s called “Spearman’s rank-order correlation,” and it tells you if two data sets move in the same direction.

Two sets of data can have what’s called a “monotonic” relationship, which basically means that if one value goes up, the other value goes up; and if one value goes down, the other goes right down with it. Monotonicity doesn’t necessarily care about the direction of that relationship. It just cares that the two go together.

Let’s look at something topical. Specifically, let’s see how Kirk Cousins’s and Eli Manning’s passing yards compare over a given sixteen-game season. If Cousins and Manning had a strong Spearman rank-order correlation (shortened as Spearman’s rho, because mathematicians like Greek), we would Manning’s passing yards go up if Cousins has a great game, and if Manning only throws for a hundred yards, Cousins will have a bad game too. I’m going to ignore bye weeks in this example so each will have exactly sixteen games.

Okay, so not really correlated… in fact, they’re actually slightly negatively correlated, which would imply that Cousins has bad games when Manning has good ones and vice versa. But it’s a loose relationship, so we won’t compare that too much.

This isn’t much of a fair comparison, though. If the Giants were playing the Patriots on the same week that Washington was playing Philadelphia, we’d expect Manning to have a bad game while Cousins has a great one. So let’s compare how they fared when facing similar teams and see if the correlation improves.

The first words of this post started where they so often do: on the road. Specifically, they started at Ling and Louie’s Asian Bar and Grill at Terminal A of DFW Airport, where Robbie has just poured me a Deschutes Obsidian Stout to help get my ideas flowing. This beer lives up to its name. It’s black as can be - impenetrably so. If I’m not actively moving the glass, it settles into a solid mass that makes the outside look painted. It doesn’t have the bitter bite of a Guinness, though. It’s creamy, almost buttery. Robbie’s a dutiful airport bartender. Aside from checking in once to see if I wanted something to eat, he’s left me alone. He knows his guests that want to talk. We all travel in our own way, you never know what kind of mood you’ll be in when you’re on the road.

I am only a few gates down from gates A18 through A22, which I have gotten to know quite well. I’ve been there four times this month for a few different work-related trips. I know there’s a stack of gutbomb fast food joints, the ubiquitous Vino Volo, the Pinkberry. I know this without having to go look to double-check. They’ll be there in a pinch if I need something quick, and if I have time to think - there’s Ling and Louie’s.

By accident or by fate, I have spent much of the eight thousand miles I’ve traveled this month meditating on what it means to be a man. Not a man in the sense of gender, but in the sense of maturity. I don’t know what triggered it. Perhaps it was the seed of Robert Pirsig’s ideas on quality that finally bloomed after reading them earlier this year. Perhaps it was Philip Chavanne’s The Early Tales of Snow and Oakham which tells the story of an adventurer handing off his creation and his stories to his sons. Or maybe it was Being Nixon, a phenomenal biography of the psyche of Richard Nixon and a reminder that presidents had to learn to grow up too. Maybe it was watching a healthy amount of Anthony Bourdain shows in Dallas, a man who I unashamedly aspire to emulate. Who knows. Maybe it was just the road. It unlocks my mind in ways a steady home address never can.

I have meditated on the requirement of responsibility for myself and for others. I have previously contemplated the need to take ownership of my own life, but Chavanne’s book has made me dwell on responsibility for the lives of those outside myself. Is there an element of manhood that involves willingly stepping up to shoulder the needs of others? I believe there is.

I have thought about the road and what it means to me to be out here. When I was younger, I thought travel was only about exploring new places and trying new food. Now that I’m older, I realize that the road is an opportunity for reflection that - for whatever reason - I can’t find at home. It was draws me to long flights and solo stints in cars. That’s where I get my chance to think.

I have pondered my future and what I want to do to achieve it. That motivation, that drive, was lost to me for most of the summer. I didn’t lose my way, but I certainly felt like I was sitting at a crossroads and couldn’t find the motivation to pick a direction and get moving. Now I’m back.

I’m back in D.C. now, because I rarely start and finish a post the same day. I’m celebrating the friends I have here. The road is a good place for lonely reflection, and home is a place for baseball games, house parties, and the people you care about. The road is a good place for pondering ideas, but home is where they must be turned into action.

And to close, as I always do, I have a bulleted list of accomplishments from the month:

Trained consistently for at least four days a week, even while traveling

Brought on a new college hire at work

Closed a major client project, despite working far more hours than I wanted to on it

Learned more about machine learning, Scala, and forecasting

Enjoyed a proper Sunday on the beach in Chicago

Next month I’ll be on the road (again) visiting Charleston and some client sites. I hope in the latter part of the month to return to more focused learning and cooking more at home. And football returns very, very soon.

What would you do with your week if you knew you wouldn’t feel guilty about what you didn’t do?

There’s an implied answer to this question that’s sort of guilt-inducing in itself. The implied answer of “oh, you didn’t go skydiving off the Amalfi Coast? You didn’t launch a startup? You didn’t see every one of your friends and family members? Suppose you did all that. What would you do the next day? And the next? How would you structure your life?

I have this voice that nags at the back of my head and it tells me weird things on a regular basis. It’s really obsessed with eating breakfast in the morning. I’m pretty sure that this is because I used to force myself to eat these massive breakfasts and second breakfasts back when I was trying to gain weight, and the little voice in my head is convinced that I’ll turn back into a scrawny rat if I don’t eat breakfast. For the same reasons, that voice is really obsessed with working out a lot.

That voice is also convinced that studying business and technology tomes is the hidden key to success, and if I don’t read enough then my career is going to fail. It’s also convinced that if I don’t write blog posts, my career will probably sputter too, even though I don’t really write about my career on my blog. This voice has twisted logic.

When I wrote my last blog post, I was hanging out in San Francisco with a friend who doesn’t include breakfast as part of his daily routine. (quelle horreur!) He is a coffee-only before lunch kind of guy, and while I was there, I decided I would experiment with coffee-only before lunch. And you know what? I actually liked it. It saved so much time in the morning and I could get by on less caffeine since I could afford to sleep more. The world did not come crashing down around me without my standard two eggs and yogurt.

This prompted me to ask myself an interesting question: what would I actually do with myself if I didn’t try to hold to a rigorous routine day after day? What if I didn’t make plans to work out? What if I didn’t try to wake up earlier to squeeze more out of the day? What if I didn’t try to only sleep six hours?

Here’s what happened:

I went to the gym just twice, both days when I was in Disney World. I decided I was having way more fun swinging heavy steel clubs around, running outside from time to time, and playing basketball. Going to the gym in DC is just a drag for me right now. I don’t like treadmills or ellipticals, I don’t like waiting for benches to open up, and I don’t like taking an extra hour out of my day just to get there and back. After almost ten years of being a regular gym rat, I finally took some time off.

I started drinking better coffee in the mornings. I upgraded my coffee game with a French press and some Qualia Coffee, the best brew in DC.

I didn’t really eat breakfast. Sometimes I had toast with peanut butter.

I slept more. I hit seven hours a night on a regular basis, and sometimes even eight. My alarm can go off at 7:30AM and I can still make it into the office by 9:00 by not working out or worrying about breakfast.

I learned more at work and got more done in less time, which is a direct result of not being dog tired. I suspect sleep might be one of those things where you either have to get seven-plus hours (like Arianna Huffington) or sub-five hours (like Jocko Willink), but there’s probably not a middle ground here. I like the Huffington approach way more.

I traveled to Disney World with my college roommates. This is a super fun trip as an adult. There are certain parts of the park that you will enjoy way more once you’re over 21 (you probably never knew that there’s a bar in Epcot that features over a hundred tequilas and a few dozen mezcals), and there are other parts of the park that will make you feel like a kid again (hello, fireworks show at the Magic Kingdom castle).

The most important thing that changed wasn’t what I actually got accomplished. That stayed mostly constant. What changed was how I felt about it all. I was genuinely happier doing things that I liked when I let them flow into my schedule, and I was way less thrown off when I had to carve out time for an actual chore because I wasn’t treating everything like a chore. It was a remarkably mentally easy way to live.

I’ll be on the road a bit next month with some work-related travel and some beach-related travel. I’ll be reading. I’ll be learning. I’ll be enjoying life a little more while I do all of it.